Git Workflow

• How it works
• Feature Branches
• Hotfix Branches
• Summary

This Git Workflow is for Ingress's internal team, It's hybrid copy of Gitflow. Gitflow is ideally suited for projects that have a scheduled release cycle so it did fit in our development workflow so we made few changes in it and comeup with a hybrid version.

#How it works

Staging and Master Branches

Instead of a single master branch, this workflow uses two branches to record the history of the project. The master branch stores the production ready features, and the staging branch serves as an integration branch for features.

The first step is to complement the default master with a staging branch. A simple way to do this is for one developer to create an empty staging branch locally and push it to the server.

git branch staging git push -u origin staging

This branch will contain the complete history of the project, whereas master will contain an abridged version.

#Feature Branches

Each new feature should reside in its own branch using feature/ prefix, But instead of branching off of staging, feature branches use master as their parent branch. When a feature is complete, it gets merged into staging for client reviews and when same feature is approved by client and QA, it gets merged into master for production deployments.

Creating a feature branch

git checkout master git pull origin master git checkout -b feature/my_feature

Finishing a feature branch

When you’re done with the development work on the feature, the next step is to merge the feature/my_feature into staging to show it Client and QA for their approval.

git checkout staging git pull origin staging git merge --no-ff feature/my_feature git push origin staging

feature branch ready for production

After Client's approval, the next step is to merge the feature/my_feature into master to deploy it production server

git checkout master git pull origin master git merge --no-ff feature/my_feature git push origin master

Deleting feature branch

Once it get deployed to prodction, the next step is to delete local and remote branch.

git branch -D feature/my_feature git push origin :feature/my_feature

#Hotfix Branches

hotfix branches are used to quickly patch for production. This branch that should fork directly off of master. As soon as the fix is complete, it should be merged into both master and staging.

git checkout master git pull origin master git checkout -b hotfix/my_fix

Similar to finishing a feature branch, a hotfix branch gets merged into both master and staging.

git checkout master git pull origin master git merge --no-ff hotfix/my_fix git push origin master

git checkout staging git pull origin staging git merge --no-ff hotfix/my_fix git push origin staging

#Summary

• A staging branch is created from master
• A feature branch is created from master
• When a feature is complete it is merged into the staging branch
• When the feature is approved it is merged into master
• If an issue in master is detected a hotfix branch is created from master
• Once the hotfix is complete it is merged to both staging and master